Bipartisanship Is Great For Politicians But Gridlock Is Better For The American People

Many hands are being wrung among the elite governing class about Congressional gridlock. The Democrats have invoked the “nuclear option” — allowing the Senate majority in effect to prevail by simple, rather than 60%, majority. (This will come back to haunt them if majority control turns Republican in next year’s election.)

Fortunately for us mere citizens the House is still Republican controlled. It thereby is situated to block the worst Big Government initiatives.

In the great “Hunting of the Snark” on Capitol Hill many legislators of both parties have broken their picks in “supercommittees” and "gangs" and other efforts to foment a “grand bargain” or other grandiose deal. This typically is done in the name of “bipartisanship.”

“Bipartisanship” makes this writer uneasy. It often represents Washington code signifying collusion by Republicans and Democrats to stick it to the taxpayers and citizens. So in this celebratory season gridlock is something to celebrate.

The Founders intentionally created a legislative, and governmental, system where it was hard to enact bad ideas. Our ruling elites have a burden of persuasion, built right into the Constitution, that the laws they seek to enact are all (or at least mostly) to the good.

Legislation should be difficult. As President John F. Kennedy unforgettably observed in announcing the manned moon program: “We choose to go to the moon … and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

The Obama administration, from the president on down, has sought to circumvent its Constitutional burden of persuasion. It has done so through duplicity, as in “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” — an aggressively repeated claim that has won the president Politifacts' “Lie of the Year.” The Obama administration also has sought to circumvent the Constitutional burden of persuasion through abuse of the regulatory process, which Heritage Foundation calls an upcoming Regulatory “Superstorm."

Bipartisanship, in the system designed by the Founders and currently being trampled by progressives, is something to be reserved for really good ideas. The “American Way” simply is not amenable to the jejune notions of Romantic Utopians such as those of our dear “progressives.”

And thus it is worthy to reflect, in this season of Glad Tidings of Comfort and Joy, on a Camelot of bipartisanship only hazily, if at all, remembered: Senate passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 reducing the top marginal tax rate on individual income from 50% (only shortly prior, 70%) to 27% (28% as enacted). By a vote of 97 to 3.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, two former political adversaries — one Democrat and one Republican — sat in a Senate office. They were there, together, to celebrate their signal legislative triumph. This represented an historically extraordinary collaboration.

Sen. Bill Bradley and his former Republican rival for that office, Jeffrey Bell (with whom this writer has a professional association), sat, together, in Sen. Bradley’s office. When word of its overwhelming passage arrived, they opened and shared a bottle of champagne. Their triumph, for which credit was shared by a very small cadre of paradigm-shifters called “the Supply Side,” was sweet. It doesn't get more bipartisan than 97 to 3.

This triumph heralded an epoch of tremendous economic growth spanning the administrations of Ronald Reagan and William Clinton. Reagan’s administration saw splendid recovery growth rates leading to one of the largest electoral landslide re-elections in American political history. By (mostly) maintaining low marginal tax rates and cutting the capital gains rate and reforming welfare (the latter two under the impetus of then House Speaker Newt Gingrich), the Clinton administration enjoyed such economic growth as to place the federal treasury into surplus.

To achieve this paradigm shift from high marginal tax rates and cheap money to low marginal tax rates and healthy money was not easy. It was hard.

The capital had been occupied by big government Democrats and by a docile minority of establishment Republicans. A tiny but doughty band of dissidents arose. They argued that the poor economic growth was caused by an inverted economic policy.